Student Volunteers Boost SCHIP Enrollment in NY 

By Houkje Ross


Closing the Gap, State Children’s Health Insurance Program • January 2000


William Ching was uninsured as a child and considers it an 

injustice for any child to go without health care. That’s 

why he volunteers for the Student Health Outreach 

Project (SHOUT), an effort of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) 

to use student volunteers in SCHIP outreach and enrollment efforts. 

“As a future physician, I have an ethical and moral obligation to 

do this,” says Ching, a senior at New York University’s School of 

Medicine and a member of the student section of the American Medical Association (AMA). 

SHOUT began in 1998 as a partnership between the CDF’s 

New York chapter (CDF-NY), Northern Manhattan communitybased organizations, and student volunteers from Columbia University. Their charge was to increase enrollment of uninsured children in 

the heavily African American and Hispanic Washington Heights and 

Harlem neighborhoods. 

During the six-month pilot phase, SHOUT succeeded in enrolling approximately 200 children using 25 student volunteers, according to Sarah Katz, project coordinator for SHOUT at CDF-NY. “Families have responded well to the young students’ energy and enthusiasm,” she says. 

Expanding the Pilot Project 

This year, SHOUT has continued as a student-run effort, Katz 

says. The project takes many different forms, but the overall goal is to 

recruit and train students and then link them to community-based 

efforts to educate families about the availability of free and low-cost 

health insurance. Students are trained to see families through to enrollment. SHOUT students receive training on NewYork’s Medicaid 

and SCHIP eligibility guidelines, application processes, how families 

access health care through the programs, confidentiality issues, and 

outreach strategies. 

Ching and other medical students from the student section of 

AMA then educate their peers and the medical community about 

issues of the uninsured. “We want to make sure that medical students 

are acutely aware of the issue, and that the problem doesn’t get lost in 

the shuffle,” Ching says. 

The student section of AMA has taken SHOUT on as its national service project, involving 40,000 medical students at 140 medical 

schools across the country. “The Albert Einstein College of Medicine 

is holding workshops in educating medical students, hospital staff, 

and attending physicians at local hospitals about the scope of the 

problem of uninsured children,” Ching adds. 

Medical students provide hospitals with information about their 

local population and whom to contact concerning enrollment. Medical students are also being trained on how to carry out enrollment 

themselves. 

Other student activities include: 

•	 Conducting educational presentations to parents at day care centers, schools, tenant associations and other community meetings. 

They also talk with families and inform them of the SCHIP 

program. 

•	 Passing out flyers in commercial districts, laundromats, checkcashing sites, and public housing facilities. Flyers are in English 

and Spanish, and list all SHOUT sites and times when student 

volunteers are available to help families. Each enrollment site has 

its own version of the flyer with specific hours of services and 

phone numbers. 

•	 Sharing SCHIP information at community forums, including 

coalition meetings and staff meetings of community-based organizations. Students also encourage organizations to refer families 

to SHOUT sites. Volunteers attend at least one community event 

per week. 

•	 Helping families fill out SCHIP documents, including helping 

families understand requirements and doing follow-up work to 

ensure that applications are completed. 

There are now seven SHOUT projects in the state of New York, 

which uses student volunteers from several universities, high schools, 

and youth organizations. Each project is different but most focus on 

outreach and education, Katz says. “Students in the Columbia 

SHOUT project are the only ones who currently help families enroll 

at two community-based sites, but this could change as the other 

programs develop,” she says. 

“The CDF plans to launch similar efforts all across the country,” 

says Marian Wright Edelman, president and founder of the CDF. 

“The student volunteers are an important part of our nationwide 

effort to be sure that every child receives the quality health care they 

deserve.” 

For more information about the SHOUT Project, contact Sarah 

Katz, project coordinator, (212) 697-2323.

Office of Minority Health Resource Center	 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services